Actually yes, if just a man had a profile on this system, he'd have made a deposit. After defaulting on his agreement he'd lose that deposit, the funds for the trade would have been in escrow and would be safe.

On top of that just a mans credit rating would take a hit, and his default would permanently be on his record for anyone doing future dealings with him. And because his profile is tied not just to his facebook profile, but that of his friends he can't just come back with a new accout (he could but his credit rating for a newly created accout would be so low no one would trust him).

Not sure that's way cheaper than what they cost actually, depending on the details of the agreement, I have a virtual server for $15 a month and I'm allowed to resell hosting. So for the same price I could act as a middle man between someone here to accept bitcoin as payment, not looking to get into that business though, just saying the offer of hosting for 20 btc a month isn't totally out there.

Not sure that's way cheaper than what they cost actually, depending on the details of the agreement, I have a virtual server for $15 a month and I'm allowed to resell hosting. So for the same price I could act as a middle man between someone here to accept bitcoin as payment, not looking to get into that business though, just saying the offer of hosting for 20 btc a month isn't totally out there.

The first sever he leased to me was for a dedicated server, 4 cores, 2 gigs ram for 10BTC a month.

These are dedicated servers he was selling, not a VPS.

You are right though, that is a viable business model for anyone interested.

I really do think the guy lost his job. He was probably an admin at a hosting company and thought he could make some btc on servers that were not being used (without telling his boss). This is why I was able to get a dedicated server for only 10btc that first time, and why the prices were so good. It's also why he's been moving others around onto different servers. Requests came in for the servers and he'd have to move us off them (as we were the illegitemate customers) onto something else temporarily.

This was generally the impression that I got, but it doesn't really explain why he claims the coins are spent but they haven't moved from the addresses we sent them to. I looked at mtgox and it seems you have to specify how much is going to the account before it gives you an address so I guess he wouldn't have received my second payment of 30 bitcoins since I sent them without warning to the same address as he previously gave me and then sent an email afterwards. So it would still suggest he is lieing about having spent the bitcoins.